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Blogvent Day 20 - Twenty 11 trends and predictions

Business | Technology

At this time of the year lots of people, but particularly astrologers, analysts and technology companies, take up the challenge of prophesising the major trends and events of next year. While many of us think that we can discount the former, the predictions of the latter two do tend to be either broad enough to be correct or alternatively blinding obvious anyway. It is interesting to read them though particularly when the two visions are diametrically opposed.

A quick round up of prophecies for 2011 reveal a few potentially interesting possibilities. IDC believes that IT spending will recover, led by a surge in cloud services, but supported by healthy increases in hardware and software. This will boost service providers such as CSC, Logica and IBM as well as the infrastructure and technology providers that they rely on such as Cisco, Oracle, Intel and VMWare. IDC also dug deep into the crystal ball to predict that non-PC mobile devices will out sell PC’s during the next 18 months, a theory that doesn’t exactly warrant a move to the top of the class. More interestingly they estimate that 25 billion mobile apps will be sold next year compared to 10 billion this year. Both IDC and Gartner are predicting the rising business impact of social computing or social networking technologies and principles in small and enterprise class businesses. This is partly forced by employees and partly by consumers, but the latter in particular will shake up verticals such as retail, some areas of financial services and healthcare. Gartner is more esoteric with other predictions including the growth of cloud, context aware computing and pattern based strategies.

Of interest from a social and a marketer’s perspective, Intel came out with a comment suggesting that Minority Report like smart, interactive digital signage with face and gesture recognition will become widely accepted. Whether this is the logical continuation of a Big Brother, CCTV society or just a question of high street retailers trying to catch up with the cookies of the online word remains to be seen. In line with some of other Intel’s other offerings they also predict strong laptops sales, perhaps in contradiction to IDC’s view, as well as strong market acceptance of Smart, internet enabled TV from partners Google, Logitech and Sony.

Only time will tell which if any of these visions is right.

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